Reports are widely used in business applications to analyze and share data. Reports that are pre-packaged with a business application are commonly referred to as production reports. Production reports are typically created by business application developers, and are used to create views of the application data that are useful to and can be shared across multiple users. Users can access production reports via menus and contextual links surfaced in a business application. Production reports in business applications range from being simple list and tabular renderings of data to richer visualizations that include charts, cross-tabs, and composite renderings.
Developers often use report designing tools to build and integrate production reports in business applications. These report designing tools are applied by developers to datasets to retrieve report data, and visually define report layouts, such as by dragging/dropping and moving data fields around, to achieve the desired presentation. A typical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) business application tends to have around 800 to 1,000 pre-packaged production reports. The developer effort required to create the designs for all production reports from scratch using a report designing tool is a significant investment; hundreds of worker-hours of skilled labor are commonly invested in designing and integrating production reports in an ERP business application.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.